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When the Conservatives formed their coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the May 2010 code spelt out their duties.

1.2 The Ministerial Code should be read alongside the Coalition agreement and the background of the overarching duty on Ministers to comply with the law “including international law and treaty obligations and to uphold the administration of justice” and to protect the integrity of public life. [My emphasis]

With the Liberal Democrats gone, and Conservatives governing alone, a fresh version of the code was issued earlier this month. It opens with David Cameron promising that his ministers will be ‘transparent in all we do’. He will root out ‘any form of misconduct’ and always remember that ‘good government is precious’.

But the means by which ministers will bring about ‘good government’ have changed without anyone noticing. The revised October 2015 ministerial code spells out their new duties.

1.2 The Ministerial Code should be read against the background of the overarching duty on Ministers to comply with the law and to protect the integrity of public life.

All reference to complying with ‘international law and treaty obligations’ and upholding ‘the administration of justice’ has gone.

Why?

Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

Alan H wrote:A person could certainly change some aspects of their gender, but - AFAIK - there are no ways to change all aspects. I 'grudgingly' accept that a person could have surgery to change that one physical aspect of their gender, but that does not change their gender. Your chromosomes, for example, stay as they were.

However, the fact still remains that location is not a protected characteristic under the HRA. Gender is.

first point: surely it is the social and therefore probably superficial amendments to gender which are important, not the chromosomes - who cares about these? Second point Location may not a protected characteristic, but it should be!!!! You keep evading the point that forcing insurance companies to go through the motions of treating people equally fails to do this

Alan H wrote:A person could certainly change some aspects of their gender, but - AFAIK - there are no ways to change all aspects. I 'grudgingly' accept that a person could have surgery to change that one physical aspect of their gender, but that does not change their gender. Your chromosomes, for example, stay as they were.

However, the fact still remains that location is not a protected characteristic under the HRA. Gender is.

first point: surely it is the social and therefore probably superficial amendments to gender which are important, not the chromosomes - who cares about these? Second point Location may not a protected characteristic, but it should be!!!! You keep evading the point that forcing insurance companies to go through the motions of treating people equally fails to do this

I've no idea what your first point is saying - superficial amendments to gender? But why should location be a protected characteristic under human right legislation? It isn't currently, so isn't a moot point in this discussion anyway?

Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

Alan H wrote:I've no idea what your first point is saying - superficial amendments to gender? But why should location be a protected characteristic under human right legislation? It isn't currently, so isn't a moot point in this discussion anyway?

OK, first issue. Gender and sex are often regarded differently. Gender is a social construct, sex is about chromosomes. So surgery is probably able to give an individual a different gender, if requested, but is less likely to achieve chromosomal changes. Insurance companies are likely to believe a person when they say that they are female, a social construct, even if that person's chromosomes remain male. Second issue. You and I sound like a gramophone record, since I every time I say that location should not be a factor in determining the cost of insurance, you reply that it is not currently "protected" and so is not relevant to the discussion. You must know that to say something is the case does not mean that it ought to be so; therefore, to say that something (a person's residential location) is not currently a characteristic which requires protection from discrimination does not mean that it should not in fact be protectedhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_g ... istinction

Yes, whether or not it ought to be is a separate matter from whether it currently is or not part of the HRA or whatever - which is what we were talking about. However, all I think you've done so far is assert that you think it ought to be and have not offered any arguments as to why you think that or how you think that could be achieved.

Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

Alan H wrote:Yes, whether or not it ought to be is a separate matter from whether it currently is or not part of the HRA or whatever - which is what we were talking about. However, all I think you've done so far is assert that you think it ought to be and have not offered any arguments as to why you think that or how you think that could be achieved.

I don't know who you include as "we" in "what we were talking about". I was always talking about the wisdom and fairness of the HRA being applied in the area of insurance premiums, and I suspect that Nick has been talking about this too. It surely cannot be wise or fair to discriminate against different forms of discrimination is what I said in the previous discussion on this topic

The government’s attempt to rush through changes to the electoral registration system, which could result in up to 1.9 million people disappearing from the roll, is to be challenged in the House of Lords.

In a rerun of the battles in the last parliament to redraw the constituency boundaries, the Liberal Democrats are opposing the changes, calling them “an outrageous gerrymander”.

The voters likely to fall off the register are mainly in inner-city areas and less likely to vote Conservative.

The Electoral Commission had advised the government in June to spend another year transferring voters on the old household-based register to the new individual register, but ministers want to short-circuit the process so that it is completed by December 2015, and not the end of 2016. The commission says there are 1.9 million names on the household register that are not on the individual register.

The cleaned-up register will form the basis of the parliamentary constituency boundary review to be conducted before the 2020 election that will both reduce the number of seats and see a redrawing of the boundaries in favour of the Conservatives.

Electoral Commission says people risk being disenfranchised if new system of voter registration is brought in too soon

Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

Even if we could all agree on what is, and isn't porn (we can't) there is no boiler room in the world big enough to sort the Web into "porn" and "not porn." There is no regular expression or supervised machine learning algorithm smart enough to do the job. At Web scales, even small margins of error add up to gross miscarriages of justice: overblock one percent of the Web and you've censored more legitimate work than is to be found in any library; underblock one percent of the Internet's porn and you're letting through more pornography than is for sale in all of Soho.

Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

The report that Tameside hospital is setting up a permanent on-site food bank in A&amp;E, with food parcels for needy patients who are going home, is shocking – but sensible. What’s the point of spending a fortune on operations and drugs for people whose primary condition is poverty and malnutrition?

Other hospitals have already started offering food and clothing, after a sharp rise in people admitted with malnutrition. A national health service has to consider patients’ health in the round – and so should the government, to curb healthcare costs. But the Tory view has been that food is not a state concern. The Trussell Trust, which organises most of the country’s mushrooming 1,200 food banks, was disgracefully accused by Iain Duncan Smith of political motivation, as if food banks were only put there to cause him political embarrassment.

Department for Work and Pensions minister Lord Freud sneered that “by definition there is an almost infinite demand for free food” in a “let them eat cake” kind of way that showed he’d never visited a food bank and couldn’t be bothered to find out how they work. They don’t dish out free food to any passer-by, but to those with vouchers sent by a social worker, doctor, vicar or someone who knows their desperate situation. If he had visited a food bank and seen the rows of basic pasta, tea, tinned tomatoes and baked beans, he would know this is only food of the last resort.

The DWP is the single biggest reason why people fetch up needing emergency food. Up to half of food bank clients arrive because their benefits have been delayed or sanctioned by Job Centre staff working to quotas of people they must punish each month. So Iain Duncan Smith telling the work and pensions select committee he would send in some job advisers to “help” food bank clients was at best disingenuous. In food banks I have visited, clients are sent there with referral notes from Job Centre advisers who have deliberately failed to tell them abouthardship payments they might qualify for.

There is no link between benefit values and the cost of survival: that was broken long ago. The Child Poverty Action Group records how basic jobseeker’s allowance has fallen by a third since 1979, and is now worth only 15% of average earnings. The government refuses to give any estimate as to how this can ever cover energy bills, transport and food. Food, families report, is the only flexible bill and the first item to be cut back. The Fabian Commission on Food and Poverty, published today, provides a wealth of statistics on the lack of availability of nutritious food to hard-pressed families. If you only have £19 left a week to feed a family, you go for maximum calories to keep hunger away - and many parents skip their own meals by the end of the week. Go shopping with a mother scrimping to get by, and you soon see why the cheapest and worst frozen food maximizes meals per penny. Fresh fruit and veg is impossible. The “let them eat lentils” brigade forget mothers need to be sure children will eat what they’re given. Lentils are the modern version of do-gooding Victorians who preached the doctrine of porridge to families surviving on bread and a scrape of dripping. That tradition survives among Tory MPs: if only the poor were better household managers they could live nutritiously on next to nothing a week.

David Cameron’s party conference speech has aged badly in the three weeks since he made it. His attempt at reprising caring Conservatism in the face of a tsunami of brutal cuts looks both duplicitous and absurd. His promised “all-out assault on poverty” has been exposed as an all-out assault on the poor. Six times he refused yesterday at PMQs to answer Jeremy Corbyn’s question as to whether he would ensure the working poor would not lose their tax credits. However George Osborne is forced to soften the impact, it’s plain that people in under-paid jobs are still destined to lose heavily – and this time there will be no disguising it.

The hospital malnutrition story has another alarming ingredient. Many of those patients are the elderly confused, who may or may not have funds to buy food, but need help. The number of over-65s has risen by 11% in the last five years, the number of over-80s is rising at its fastest rate ever, yet at the same time 150,000 fewer of the frail old get any help at all, while many of the most vulnerable get scant 15-minute visits, and no cooking or shopping.

The £4.6bn cuts to local government are, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, about to be worsened with another 40% cut, hitting care for both vulnerable children and old people. George Osborne reached into the public health budget that he had just devolved to local government and seized £200m out of it, mid-year, yet that’s the budget that runs nutrition programmes and catches early problems before they end up on the NHS doorstep. Consider the number of people with mental health problems, learning difficulties and emotional confusions, and the number of children more or less fending for themselves in families with parents suffering those conditions, and malnutrition is just one sign of state neglect that hospitals end up coping with. The NHS dreads a winter of extreme pressure, multiplied by the fall-out from cuts to benefits and care. George Osborne may find his tax credit fiasco is just the first of his austerity pigeons flapping home to roost on the Treasury roof.

Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

George Osborne should be aware of his achievement, because he must be one of the first people to be warned he’s being too mean to the poor by a body made up of the aristocracy, people dressed in ermine and bishops.

This proves his leadership potential, similar to a burglar being so determined he’s told by his colleagues: “Hang on, George, leave them the Sugar Puffs. We can’t take everything off the poor sods.” But instead of taking credit, he’s humble enough to explain the main issue of this uneasiness about cutting the income of the poorest people, which is that it creates a “constitutional crisis”.

That’s the real pain that will be felt by the families who lose £1,300 a year. When children ask: “Why have we got to go without breakfast from now on, Mummy?” they’ll be told: “Because if we’re allowed to keep getting tax credits it would disturb an unspecified constitutional legislative protocol that may or may not have been established in 1910. Do you want to ruin that just for a boiled egg? Now remember, if you faint at school, chew on a finger.”

Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?